Religion Blog

View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoSAMUEL JAMES | THE NEW YORK TIMESA woman rests in the church of Christ the King in Lagos, Nigeria, one of the few safe places in the crowded former capital.

AGOS, Nigeria — The young woman slept soundly on the cool marble floor before the altar, a break
from the chaos at home. In the courtyard, neighborhood teenagers filled giant jerrycans with
purified water from a stone fountain. In an aisle, a rail-thin young woman from a nearby slum said
she had not eaten since the day before but was expecting sustenance here.

Behind its high, spiked iron gates in this frenetic megalopolis of anywhere between 11 million
and 21 million, the church of Christ the King is protector, feeder and healer.

In the 6 a.m. darkness, this working-class church already is filled with parishioners in
shirt-sleeves and T-shirts, a pool of hymn-singing light in a blacked-out neighborhood. Six Masses
are celebrated here each Sunday for up to 10,000 people, and 102 people were baptized last
Saturday. The parish priest, the Rev. Ikenna Ikechi, dreams of building a multistory community
center to accommodate his growing flock. “Our only limitation is space,” he said.

The Roman Catholic Church’s explosive growth here and across Africa has led to serious talk of
the possibility of an African cardinal succeeding Pope Benedict XVI, and clerics from Nigeria,
Ghana and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has the continent’s largest Catholic population,
have been mentioned as contenders.

With 16 percent of the world’s Catholics now living in Africa, the church’s future, many say, is
here. The Catholic population in Africa grew nearly 21 percent between 2005 and 2010, far
outstripping other parts of the world. While the number of priests in North America and Europe
declined during the same period, in Africa they grew by16 percent. The seminaries, clerical
officials here say, are bursting with candidates, and African priests are being sent to take over
churches in former colonial powers.

Untainted by the child sexual-abuse scandals, the church here draws parishioners, many in their
20s and 30s, who flock eagerly to services, which can last hours, with no complaints.

“After work, a lot of young people come to Mass,” said Chinedu Okani, 29, an engineer in Lagos
who was attending a service at the Church of the Assumption in the Falomo neighborhood. “It
provides a serene environment.”

He acknowledges another attraction, too: that the church is a functioning institution in a
country that lacks them.

“The welfare system is not working here,” Okani said. “We find a way to make up for it: the
family and the church.”

In Nigeria, at least70 percent of the people live below the poverty line, and 80 percent of the
country’s oil wealth goes to 1 percent of the population. The police do not respond to calls, and
electricity is spotty.

Outside Christ the King, on the dirt streets of the Mushin neighborhood, there are armed robbers
and no lights. It is little wonder that the priest must gently shoo away parishioners lingering to
read or chat in the church’s arcaded meeting spaces under generator-powered lights.

“A lot of it is the challenge of living in Nigeria,” said Ikechi, who was educated at Fordham
University in New York. “We can’t rely on the government for water, light, security. Whatever you
want, you have to provide for yourself.”

For his parishioners, he said, “what they face is huge. So they tend to come to God as their
last resort. You can’t go to the police. Who will you go to? You will go to God. Some of them,
where they sleep is so bad, they just come to sleep here during the day.”

After a devastating bus crash recently, the church paid parishioners’ hospital bills, the priest
said. “Otherwise they would die,” he said.

In this way the church is fulfilling a role it played in its distant European past, providing
for the people where the state cannot.

“When people say Africa is the future, I say, ‘Oh, isn’t it the past?’ ” said the Rev. Thomas
J. Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University in
Washington. “I see it as a repeat of the past, what happened in Europe centuries ago. What’s going
to happen in Africa when everybody gets a television set, when modernity comes?”

For now, that question is largely academic.

“Almost every system has collapsed,” said Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah of Sokoto, in northwestern
Nigeria. “The entire architecture of governance has collapsed. The church remains the only moral
force.

“The church offers the best schools, social services, medicine. The God talk in Africa is a mark
of the failure of the economic, social and political system,” Kukah added. “We are being called
left, right and center to mend the broken pieces of what are considered the failing states of
Africa.”